Linguistics and literary theory

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The revolution in modern linguistics consists in regarding language
synchronically rather than diachronically. Classical philology undertakes
to construct a historical evolution of a system of language, focusing on
the study of linguistic change over a period of time (diachrony),
whereas modern linguistics studies the system as a functioning totality,
a signifying structure (synchrony). According
to Ferdinand de Saussure, the pivotal distinction is between langue ("the
whole set of linguistic habits which allow an individual to understand
and to be understood") -- which Noam Chomsky calls competence ("what
the speaker of a language knows implicitly") -- and parole (the individual
speech act itself) -- which Chomsky calls performance (what the speaker
does). The linguistic sign, Saussure contends, is
composed of the union between a signifier (an acoustic
image which differentiates the sign from all others) and a signified
(a concept or meaning). Affirming the relation between signifier and signified
to be arbitrary and conventional, Saussure deliberately ignores the referent,
the extralinguistic object to which the sign may or may not point. For
Saussure, language is a system of differences without any positive terms.
It has a vertical axis -- the paradigmatic, associative, or metaphoric
axis -- and a horizontal axis -- the syntagmatic, contiguous, or metonymic
axis. The former concerns the relations between an individual word in a
sentence and other, similar words that might be substituted for it; the
latter concerns the possibilities of syntactic combinations of words so
as to make a well-formed sentence. All of the oppositions that structural
linguistics generates -- langue and parole, system and event, signifier
and signified, code and message, metaphor and metonymy, paradigm and syntagm,
selection and combination, substitution and context, similarity and contiguity
-- are variations of the opposition between synchrony and diachrony. In
each case, the first term is privileged.

The application of this linguistic model to the study of literature
has been fruitful. Russian Formalism, semiotics,
and structuralism analogically extend Saussure's
terms into the analysis of literature. As Roland Barthes puts it, "Literature
is simply a language, a system of signs. Its being [être] is not
in its message, but in this 'system.' Similarly, it is not for criticism
to reconstitute the message of a work, but only its system, exactly as
the linguist does not decipher the meaning of a sentence, but establishes
the formal structure which allows the meaning to be conveyed." Poststructuralism
goes one step further, contending that if it is true, as structuralism
maintains, that language is a system of differences without any positive
terms, then the relational nature of signs produces a potentially infinite
process of signification. Deconstruction,
therefore, tries to demonstrate how structuralism's focus on the systematic
undercuts itself and how its privileging of langue over parole can be upset
or reversed, leaving a free play of signifiers and an elastic context that
can be infinitely extended. By contrast, speech act theory privileges parole
over langue, seeing meaning as a species of the genus intending-to-communicate,
as something use-oriented and context-dependent. Rejecting the assumptions
of theories based on the linguistic model. speech act criticism holds that
the investigation of structure always presupposes something about meanings,
language use, and extralinguistic functions. (See also Semiotics,
Speech act theory, Structuralism.)